Abstract: View merging, also called view integration, is a key
problem in conceptual modeling. Large models are often constructed
and accessed by manipulating individual views, but it is important
to be able to consolidate a set of views to gain a unified
perspective, to understand interactions between views, or to
perform various types of analysis. View merging is complicated by
incompleteness and inconsistency: Stakeholders often have varying
degrees of confidence about their statements. Their views capture
different but overlapping aspects of a problem, and may have
discrepancies over the terminology being used, the concepts being
modeled, or how these concepts should be structured. Once views
are merged, it is important to be able to trace the elements of
the merged view back to their sources and to the merge assumptions
related to them. In this paper, we present a framework for merging
incomplete and inconsistent graph-based views. We introduce a
formalism, called annotated graphs, with a built-in annotation
scheme for modeling incompleteness and inconsistency. We show how
structure-preserving maps can be employed to express the
relationships between disparate views modeled as annotated graphs,
and provide a general algorithm for merging views with arbitrary
interconnections. We provide a systematic way to generate and
represent the traceability information required for tracing the
merged view elements back to their sources, and to the merge
assumptions giving rise to the elements.